HBP and EBRAINS websites issue (2022-06-29)

The HBP and EBRAINS main websites are down because of an issue with the .io top level domain DNS. This issue is preventing our websites from rendering images, CSS files, and other files referenced from the HTML of the web pages. The issue is not internal to our infrastructure nor to that of our cloud provider. We have decided to bring down the two websites for the time being. We are monitoring the situation and looking for solutions.

Issue with the Bucket service (2022-06-27)

The bucket service (aka data proxy) is down due to an issue with the Swift archive/object storage at the infrastructure level at CSCS. The issue has been resolved. It was caused by the high availability load balancers located in front of the Swift storage at CSCS.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Maintenance of the Drive (2022-04-14)

The drive service will be down for maintenance on Thursday April 14 from 18:00 CEST for an estimated 2 to 3 hours. We are performing a routine garbage collection on the storage. During the downtime, users will not have access to the Drive: no reading/downloading of files, no adding/modifying files. This in turn means the Lab will not be usable either.

We apologize in advance for the interruption and thank you for your understanding.

The maintenance is done.

Issue with the Drive (2022-02-05)

The Drive server had an issue starting Saturday Feb 5 from 5 AM CET. The service was brought back online and was operational on Saturday. The issue was related to a disk full on the server caused by logs which then had other issues rebooting. No data was lost and backups were not affected.

Issue with OpenShift (2022-01-17)

One of the NGINX servers running in front of our OpenShift service is down due to a problem at the infrastructure level. We are in communication with the infrastructure team to get the issue resolved as quickly as possible.

The issue was resolved by the infrastructure team. The server at fault is running again. All services are up and accessible again.

Issue with the Collaboratory like/favourite feature (2022-01-13)

The feature to like/favourite a collab was down for a day due to a change in the deployment of the Wiki service. This issue has been resolved without data loss. We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this issue.

Issue on the OpenShift server at CSCS (2021-12-28)

The EBRAINS OpenShift server running at CSCS was detected as having come down. This issue affects all the services running on that OpenShift server including:

• Collaboratory Lab,
• image service,
• atlas viewers,
• simulation services (NEST desktop, TVB, Brain Simulation Platform)

We are working with the CSCS team to reactivate the service ASAP.

The service was reestablished at around 14:15 CET. The infrastructure team will continue looking into the potential causes of the problem with RedHat. The suspected cause lies in network access to the storage.

Issue on the Forum service (2021-12-27)

The Forum service went down over the weekend along with one of the redundant OpenShift servers. The issue was due to a problem at the infrastructure level.

The Forum was unavailable for a few hours on Monday. There was not perceptible effect on the services running on OpenShift.

Issue on the OpenShift server at CSCS (2021-11-24)

The EBRAINS OpenShift server running at CSCS was detected as having come down at 16:00 CEST. This issue affects all the services running on that OpenShift server including:

• Collaboratory Lab,
• image service,
• atlas viewers,
• simulation services (NEST desktop, TVB, Brain Simulation Platform)

We are working with the CSCS team and RedHat (provider of the OpenStack solution on which OpenShift runs) to reactivate the service ASAP.

The issue affected the central VM node of the OpenShift service. Restarting the VM required that we resolve multiple issues including restarting at the same IP address and unlocking the storage volumes of that VM. The central node has now been restarted. The same issue has occurred on three other instances of OpenShift VMs. They have been restarted too. OpenShift is up and running again. The DNS redirection(s) to the maintenance page is being removed. The services should be operational again.

The root cause seems to be at the infrastructure level and RedHat is involved in analyzing that.

We will keep updating this page with more information as it comes in.

Maintenance of multiple services (2021-11-11 to 2021-11-19)

We are migrating the last of our services away from an old cloud infrastructure. The production services were taken down on Wednesday November 17 and are now all back online. We will continue working on the non-production services, to return the services to the redundancy level prior to the migration, and various final tweaks.

Please contact support about any new issues you identify on our services.

The services which were migrated during this maintenance include:

• Collaboratory Bucket DONE
• Knowledge Graph Search and API DONE
• OpenShift servers which includes: DONE
  • Collaboratory Lab, DONE
  • image service, DONE
  • atlas viewers,
  • simulation services (NEST desktop, TVB, Brain Simulation Platform)

• EBRAINS Docker registry, DONE
• the Forum linked from the Collaboratory Wiki, DONE (may have login issues)
• the Education website. DONE

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.

Technical difficulties on the Drive (2021-11-03)

The Drive has experienced some technical difficulties over the past weeks caused by multiple issues.

A reboot of the Drive server due to a hardware failure revealed an issue in the communication between the Lab and the Drive. A container is started for each Lab user who opens the Lab in their browser to run their notebooks. That container remains active by default well beyond the end of the execution of the notebook and the closing of the browser tab running the Lab, unless the users explicitly stop their container. Those containers were causing unusually high traffic to the Drive. We identified the problem and found a solution with an upgrade of the tool which the Drive is based on. We have had to shift the deployment date for this fix multiple times but we will be announcing the deployment date ASAP. In the meantime we ask Lab users to kindly stop their servers from the JupyterLab menu when they are not actively working in the Lab. This is done from the JupyterLab menu: File > Hub control panel > Stop my server.

The cloud infrastructure that the Drive is running on is being upgraded and the Drive service had to be moved to the newer servers. An incorrect management command of the server caused the migration of the data to be launched twice, with the second transfer overwriting production data dated Nov 2 with stale data from Oct 20. Several backup issues stacked on top of this problem. We have been able to recover a backup which was made on the night of Sunday Oct 31 to Monday Nov 1. We are verifying that we cannot identify issues with this data before we reopen access to the Drive. Some data loss is expected for data stored on the Drive after that backup and before we put up a banner asking users, as a precaution, not to add new data to the Drive on Tuesday Nov 2 around noon. Many countries had a bank holiday on Nov 1 so for many users, the data loss should be of a few hours on Nov 2.

We sincerely apologize for the problems incurred. We appreciate that the service we provide must be trustworthy for our users. We are taking the following actions to ensure that similar problems do not happen again:

• Review of the backup procedures on the Drive server which will be extended to all EBRAINS services which we manage.
• Request notification from the underlying infrastructure when service accounts reach the limit imposed by their storage quota.
• Improve the identification of production servers to reduce the risk of the operations team misidentifying which servers are running production service.
• Improve our procedure for communication about such incidents.

The Drive service is up again. We have recovered all the data that we could. The Drive is working normally again. We will be performing a Drive upgrade ASAP. check the Wiki banner for more information.

Additionally, the Collaboratory team will be looking into mirroring services onto more than one Fenix site to reduce down time when incidents occur. This task will be more challenging for some services than for others; it might not be materially feasible for some services, but we will be analysing possibilities for each Collaboratory service.

Maintenance on 2021-10-19

Due to migration to new hardware, various EBRAINS services will be down for up to 1 hour while these services and their data are migrated. Please See our Releases page for more information on our release.

Infrastructure failure on 2021-10-04

A failure on the Openstack infrastructure at the Fenix site which hosts most of our services has brought down many EBRAINS service this morning before 9 AM CEST. A second event later in the morning at the same Fenix site brought down most other EBRAINS services. The infrastructure was brought back online in the afternoon and we have been reactivating services as quickly as possible. Some issues are still being addressed at the infrastructure level [17:00 CEST].

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank all users for their understanding.

SSL Certificates expiring September 30th

Our SSL certificates are produced by Let's Encrypt. One of their root certificates is expiring on September 30. This may cause issues for access to API services, especially from older browsers. You can find more information about these changes at the following links :

• https://letsencrypt.org/docs/dst-root-ca-x3-expiration-september-2021/
• https://letsencrypt.org/certificates/

As mentioned in the above links, if you are using one of our APIs, you should take the following steps to prevent issues:

• You must trust ISRG Root X1 (not just DST Root CA X3)
• If you use OpenSSL, you must have version 1.1.0 or later

If you access our services via a browser, please ensure that you are using a modern browser,  you can find more information here : https://letsencrypt.org/docs/certificate-compatibility/

If you are using an older device, you may no longer be able to access our services correctly, for a list of non-compatible devices please see https://letsencrypt.org/docs/certificate-compatibility/.

Collaboratory 1 shutdown (2021-09-02)

Collaboratory 1 is shutting down Wednesday September 8th. As such, please ensure you have migrated  your data to Collaboratory 2. You can view our handy guide on what data is migrated by our tools, as well as what is not covered by the semi-automated tools.

If you follow the above links, you will also find recorded migrathons, where you can find a lot of information to help you migrate your data. If you encounter any issues or problems while migrating your data, please contact EBRAINS support and we will get back to you as soon as possible. 

NOTE: You are currently viewing Collaboratory 2, which will not be shut down.

Openshift issues (2021-07-09) (Resolved)

The Openshift service has gone down. As the Collaboratory Lab and the Image service both rely on this service, they are currently unavailable. We are investigating this issue and it will be resolved as soon as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

UPDATE 2021-07-12: The issue seems to be with the Openstack servers. It is also affecting a few more VMs aside from the Openshift service. The infrastructure team is looking into it.

UPDATE 2021-07-12: The Openstack issue has been fixed. Services should be back up and running. Thank you for your patience.

Collaboratory Lab restart (2021-06-15)

The Collaboratory lab will be restarted for the purpose of changing a few background configurations.

Collaboratory User Group (UG) meeting

The UG meeting is a great way to stay informed about recent and upcoming changes to the Collaboratory as well as making your voice and ideas heard directly by the developers. If you are interested in attending this meeting, or know someone who is interested, please feel free to join these meetings

If you would like to see new features or feel certain functionality is required to improve the Collaboratory, please join the Collaboratory user group, once joined, please do not hesitate to make your suggestions. 

Drive issue (Resolved 2021-06-14)

There is currently an issue that prevents the Drive option from appearing in new collabs. Although you can still create new collabs and can access all of the other functionality provided, you will not have access to the Drive by default. You can request a Drive be manually added to your collab via support.

We apologise for any inconvenience this causes.  

Drive issue (Solved)

Users have reported issues trying to access the drive. This is something we are aware of and trying to fix as soon as possible. This issue seems to be an Openshift problem. 

Until this is resolved, users will have issues accessing any functionality that requires Drive access. This mainly concerns the Lab and to a less extant, any service that requires access to the drive.

Potential fix: We believe we have identified the issue and will be bringing the Lab service down for up to an hour at 10pm CEST on April 28th as we attempt to deploy this fix. All current Notebooks will be killed during this downtime. - Unfortunately this fix has not worked and we are looking at other solutions at the moment.

Potential fix 2: We have another small release that should fix the issue at 13:30 CEST Today. All currently running notebooks will be killed during this downtime.

This issue has been resolved, please let support know if you encounter any issues with the lab. Thank you for your understanding.

We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused

OnlyOffice license issue (Resolved)

We are aware that some users are getting issues when trying to use OnlyOffice similar to the following image:

.

We are working on this issue and will have it fixed as soon as possible, thank you for your patience and we apologise for any inconvenience caused. 

SSL certificates (2020-12-04) (Resolved)

Our SSL Certificate provider (Let's Encrypt) has been using new certificates to sign our SSL certificates as described on their website. This requires updates on our servers and on your web browsers. The updates on your web browsers often go unnoticed by the user but in some cases your browser may inform you that it needs to fetch a new certificate. You can accept this safely; most browsers don't even mention it to the user.

Note that this is not the same as accepting an exception in your browser because of a bad certificate. Accepting such exceptions can put your data and credentials at risk of a person-in-the-middle attack.

We believe we have addressed all the issues that may arise from this change in SSL certificates. If you experience any issue, especially when accessing EBRAINS APIs, don't hesitate to contact support.

Files locked in the Drive (2020-09-30) (Resolved)

A few users have reported issues in saving OnlyOffice edits to the Drive of a collab.

We are looking into this. At the time being, it seems that a small number of files are locked by the Drive which prevents OnlyOffice to update these files when they are edited online.

We are actively trying to correct the problem as promptly as possible.

The temporary workaround

When you open a file in OnlyOffice:

1. check if other users are editing the same file. The count appears at the top right corner.
2. perform a trivial edit and save
3. if you are the only user with that file open, you can trust the presence/absence of a warning message from OnlyOffice
4. if multiple users have the file open simultaneously, you can:
   1. choose to trust the first user who opened it to have checked, or
   2. check in the Drive the timestamp of the file that you just saved

OnlyOffice will notify you when you try to save a file and the save fails. If that happens:

1. read the message
2. use File > Download as ... > docx or pptx or xlsx to save the file to your computer
3. close OnlyOffice. DO NOT KEEP LOCKED FILES OPEN IN ONLYOFFICE. It would mislead others.
4. rename the file by adding _UNLOCKED at the end of the filename, before the extension
5. upload the file with its new name
6. work on this new file

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.

The Collaboratory team